This really is the final installment of this. I have shown how to use the router and views to make a site that is only one page of HTML, but still has back button functionality. Each view is tied to a Facebook API query in which I load different elements on to the page. I have a few different ways in the code that you can do this. I would like to say it is for instructional purposes, but it is actually because I was trying different methods and I did not want to go back through and update all the other views and routes.

I will show how to deal with paged data and some other tricks

Paged Facebook Data

Let’s use photos for example. To see what would be returned for an API call to /me/photos we will use the Graph API explorer. You will see that there are two top level keys data and paging. Inside of data is all the information about each photo. In the lofPictureView I loop through the photos adding them to the page

I create a list item that has an img tag and then I check for comments and let you know how many there are. If you wanted to add different information you can look through the object in the Graph API explorer and see what is available to use. Now let’s look at the paging data. This is pretty straight forward. The previous attribute has the URL for previous photos and the next has the URL for the next photos. First thing I do is see if these attributes are present and then I create a button for them.

Inside of these functions is the first gotcha. I am using jQuery’s getJson function. We want this to be JSONP and not plain old JSON. Why JSONP? Remy Sharp explains it best, “JSONP is script tag injection, passing the response from the server in to a user specified function”. We want to use this data in an anonymous function call and we need it to be JSONP. Using jQuery’s documentation we see that if we add callback=? the request will be treated as JSONP. In my functions we add callback=? and we get an object back that we can use.

You can see that we use the data returned to load another lofPhotoView of new pictures. We also pass the cached user object through the closure This.options.currUser.

Backbone Event Target

In the lofPostView I have a list of a person’s last posts. I put an attribute of data-post-id equal to the post id so that I can retrieve it. The issue comes in when you want to have access to that element and retrieve the data-post-id attribute. Backbone passes the event as a parameter so that you can pull into your function and use it. This Stackoverflow question shows how to use it. Once you have the target you can ask for the data-post-id attribute. There is one issue with this particular setup, sometimes the click will be on a div inside the li. The div does not have the attribute so we cannot grab the data from there as it does not have the attribute. We can either put this attribute on all child elements or we can test to see if the attribute is present and if not grab it from the parent. Here is the code in the lofPostView where I do that.

I have been using Google Music ever since I was able to get an account. I have already synced all the my music to it. It works great in my browser. I have one issue though. This:
It becomes just another tab in my browser. It could even be just another tab in just another instance of Chrome. This is a pain. A song I don’t like comes up and I want to go to the next or my phone rings and I need to pause the song. It is a firstworldproblem, but annoying nonetheless.

I wanted to make it more of an app. It should have its own spot in my taskbar. Because I run Windows 7 it should pinned as well so it is always there.

Chrome to the rescue

Google Chrome makes this easy. Navigate to your Google Music page http://music.google.com. Click the little wrench > Tools > Create application shortcuts. You should get a window that pops up letting you choose where to put the shortcut.

It will now work just like any other application and have its own spot in your taskbar.

I am back to finally finish this off. We are going to dive into Backbone and how we use it to create this application. I want to note up front that this is not a great tutorial for Backbone. The reason being is that I don’t use any of the model aspects of Backbone. I use it for event binding and creating views. In this context it makes sense as our model is Facebook. Another thing to note is that this uses Backbone version 0.5.3 when as of right now it is at version 0.9. It looks like it should work after being upgraded, but I haven’t tested it yet. Well let’s get started.

Finally we are getting to the backbone of this app

Backbone

Backbone is a javascript library that creates an MVC(Model, View, Controller) structure. Earlier I said this was not a great tutorial and that is because we are only using the view and controller portions of backbone. The model is coming from Facebook. We probably could abstract this out and create a backbone model for Facebook, but I chose just to use the Facebook API directly. Continue reading “Facebook SDK with Backbone – pt 3”

I know it has been awhile. Christmas came and proceeded to fill up a lot of my time. I am back, though, to finish this tutorial. We left off at the HTML skeleton. Remember this is just an outline of where we are going to put our real content. This content we will fetch from Facebook through Facebook’s SDK and then throw it up on the screen. Let’s get on to using the Facebook JavaScript SDK.

This part will cover setting up the Facebook SDK, initializing the SDK, and getting users authenticated.

Facebook SDK setup

We covered this in the last post, but I will touch on it again. We are going to use XFBML. Facebook used to have FBML, but they have deprecated this. We use XFBML to create the login button. If you look at Facebook’s Social Plugins you will see that you can implement many of them through the javascript SDK and XFBML. The last post had the old way of doing it, but here is the new updated way (it’s not much different):

This is a continuation of my last post. My re-immersion into NES games started me down the path of an 8-bit web browser. This project is not a full 8-bit browser, but rather just viewing Facebook. It uses javascript and only javascript. There is a skeleton of HTML elements for javscript to build the content. It uses the Facebook js SDK, backbone.js is used to build the content, pixelize to pixelize the photos, and jquery for ease.

This library came about because of a my purchase of an NES. It lead me to wonder what would a browser look like on the NES? The first thing would be that all the photos would be pixelized. I wanted to use the canvas element of HTML 5. I didn’t want to go through every pixel of the photo to do the pixelization, I just wanted to shrink the image down and then blow it back up to create ‘natural’ pixelization.

What would a browser look like on the NES?

The canvas element

Canvas is a new element that was part of HTML5. Canvas opens a lot of doors in HTML5 and there are a lot of amazing examples of what is possible with the canvas element, but we are only using a small portion of it’s capabilities. We can add a canvas to a web page very easily

This tutorial should show you how to take a Zend Framework project and easily add the Facebook SDK to it. You will be able easily make calls to either the Javascript or PHP SDK and also use Facebook’s new Graph API. Let’s get started. Don’t worry if you don’t have Zend Framework or don’t want to use it as I will cover how to do this outside of Zend as well.

It doesn’t matter if use Zend or not, you can follow along and use the code in your project as well.

Setup Zend Framework

First thing to do is download the latest version of Zend Framework. It is a free download, but you will have to create an account. If you don’t use Zend Framework (ZF from here on out) you really should. It is very extensible and versatile. I won’t continue to try and sell you on ZF (and most likely you already are using it).

Next thing to do is setup a project (of course if you have a project just use that). I won’t go into how to do this, but there is a great quickstart tutorial on Zend’s site that is a great introduction if you haven’t used ZF before.